John Bell, Social Media and Adegga

I met with Hugo and John Bell yesterday afternoon in Lisbon in a nice cafe near the river to talk about social media. He did a nice post on what happened. Here’s my point of view.
DeliDelux
What is social media?
John and Hugo agreed that defining social media is not easy because it’s something that is based on a lot of different things. John added a group of things that help define social media: user generated content and easy participation tools (like blogs).

Trying to get more information I’ve decided to search around the web and found a couple of answers (Wikipedia, Stowe Boyd, Jeremiah Owyang, Robert Scoble and many others.) but this one from Chris Heuer is the one I think explains it better: Social Media is redefining how we relate to each other as humans and how we as humans relate to the organizations that serve us. While it is commonly represented by blogs, podcasts, vlogs, wikis, user generated content and social networks, it is not about those specific things as much as it is about what happens around and because of those things. This includes most notably the ability and desire to easily share with each other, to build upon that which is shared and to discover people, places and things that are of interest to you, because the sharing of these things with these new tools, is making visible that which was previously unknown.

Who is John Bell
John’s is a social media evangelist working for OgilvyPR but he’s not your average agency guy. He’s doing a very interesting work in exploring and understanding what social media is and how it is changing (creating?) the relationships between companies and their customers. He’s also the head of 360º Digital Influence where he is helping clients have a clear understanding of what’s important and relevant in the web.

How to measure social media
John asked us questions to know what we think about the Portuguese social media scene. It was really interesting the way he was organizing our answers into structured ideas.

We had an interesting discussion on how to measure social media success and John has some very good thoughts on the subject. He includes such metrics as number blog mentions, number of blog posts, number of recommendations and search visibility as ways to measure a social media campaign. His work is proving that for a company or brand looking to use social media, measurement should be about the level conversation and not about pageviews or ad impressions.

Adegga and social media
John wanted to know more about Adegga. I explained how we’re trying get wine producers and wine lovers to engage in a conversation with each other. We believe that the wine industry has been hiding behind wine ratings, wine critics and expensive advertising and that has been creating doubts and damaging the relationship that people have with wine. A more open and honest approach is needed and Adegga has the ability to provide the tools that to both producers and wine lovers can use to engage in that conversation.

I finished by doing a demo of the upcoming features we’re preparing to launch soon and John gave me his valuable and experienced insight. It’s great to get such feedback from someone with his kind of experience and knowledge. He really liked Adegga and did a very nice write up about it on his blog.

One last thing. John seems to be getting a thing for Lisbon (who wouldn’t?). Next time you come (SHiFT?) take a look at my Small Guide to Lisbon and see what great places this amazing city has to offer.

March 15, 2008 | Tags: , ,  

comments

One Response to “John Bell, Social Media and Adegga”

  1. Chris Heuer on April 20th, 2008

    Andre - so very glad you like my definition - no it is not easy to do because it means different things to different people. We are in fact constantly redefining it, but at its core, it is about people being social through and because of media more than it is the thing itself…

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